"Treat Them Like Dogs"

interrogation operations were only taking place - at prisons under my control, interrogations were only being conducted at Abu Ghraib, and they were only being conducted in interrogation facilities built specifically for interrogations at Abu Ghraib. There was what they called "Interrogation Facility Wood" and "Interrogation Facility Steel." The pictures, although they were - when they were released, it was widely reported that this was during interrogation operations. In fact, it was not during interrogation operations. These pictures were being staged and set up at the direction of contract interrogators, civilian contract interrogators, for the use in future interrogations.

AMY GOODMAN: Contract interrogators. What companies?

COL. JANIS KARPINSKI: There are several. Several of the contractors that were in some of the pictures were with Titan Corporation. There has been sworn statements saying they came from "OGA," other government agencies, and CACI. I can only say that the ones that I saw in the photographs were identified as being from Titan Corporation. Now, they were - my experience with Titan Corporation was that they were providing translators, and again, in some of the information that's been released in the ACLU documents, we know that some of the translators were given the opportunity to become interrogators without any training whatsoever in interrogation operations.

AMY GOODMAN: But General Miller had said he wants to blur the bright line between military police and military intelligence, that the military police were to take the prisoners to military intelligence.

COL. JANIS KARPINSKI: Correct.

AMY GOODMAN: Your people were to be brought - Were you in charge of military intelligence?

COL. JANIS KARPINSKI: No, not at all, and the Military Intelligence Brigade Commander did not work for me. He ran the Interrogation Brigade -- the Intelligence Brigade, and he ran interrogations, which was a function at Abu Ghraib.

AMY GOODMAN: Lynndie England, Charles Graner were yours?

COL. JANIS KARPINSKI: They were. They were assigned to a subordinate company, yes.

AMY GOODMAN: When did you start to understand what was happening?

COL. JANIS KARPINSKI: About the situation at Abu Ghraib, I was first informed by an email that I received on classified - what they call "classified traffic." I opened it up late one night on the 12th of January of 2004. And it was from the commander of the Criminal Investigation Division. He sent me an email and said, "Ma'am, I just want to make you aware, I'm going in to brief the C.G.," meaning General Sanchez, "on the progress of the investigation at Abu Ghraib. This involves the allegations of abuse and the photographs." That was the first I heard of it.

I did not receive that email or phone call or a message from General Sanchez himself, who would ultimately attempt to hold me fully responsible for this, but from the C.I.D. Commander. And I was alarmed at just that short email. I was not in Baghdad at the time. I was at another location very close to the Iranian border, so we made arrangements to leave at the crack of dawn to drive down to Abu Ghraib to see what we could find out about this ongoing investigation and went through the battalion over to Cell Block 1A. The people who would normally be working on any shift were not working. The sergeant that I spoke to said that their records had been seized by the investigators, and they started a new log to account for prisoners, make sure that their meals were on time, those kind of things, and he pointed out a memo that was posted on a column just outside of their small administrative office. And the memorandum was signed by the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld. And said - it discussed interrogation techniques that were authorized. It was one page. It talked about stress positions, noise and light discipline, the use of music, disrupting sleep patterns, those kind of techniques. But there was a handwritten note out to the side. And this was a copy. It was a photocopy of the original, I would imagine. But it was unusual that an interrogation memorandum would be posted inside of a detention cell block, because interrogations were not conducted in the cell block.